Tech Sales is for Hustlers Podcast

Episode 64: Jackson Hawkins – Rock, Chalk, J. Hawk

Most see being a manager as a fast-track to more responsibility, a higher salary, a lofty title, or a bigger office. Jackson Hawkins has different motivations; he loves the thrill of guiding his employees to reach their maximum potential.

Jackson, now a Managing Director in the memoryBlue Austin office, started his career as an SDR. His journey from SDR, to Delivery Manager, to Managing Director provided him with intimate knowledge of the high-tech sales industry and the experience needed to provide valuable mentorship at all levels in the organization.

In this episode of the Tech Sales is for Hustlers – Austin Series, Jackson talks about why shedding your ego, focusing on individual needs, setting clear goals for progression, and embracing challenges along the way produce a life and career-changing leader.

Guest-At-A-Glance

Name: Jackson Hawkins

What he does: Managing Director

Company: memoryBlue

Noteworthy: Jackson accelerated his career from SDR to DM, and now serves as an MD at memoryBlue.

Where to find Jackson: LinkedIn

Key Insights

⚡ Start doing the job you want to get the job you want. Should you ask for a promotion or wait for your superiors to hand it to you? Both tactics could work, but one certainly demonstrates more initiative. Start pursuing the training for that next role unprompted and become the clear choice for promotion.

⚡ What worked for you won’t work for everyone. There are many ways to achieve the same outcome. It’s your job as a manager to cater to different learning styles within your team. Tailoring your coaching to serve each individual SDR will enable them to meet their full potential and subsequently promote collective success.

⚡ Professional growth and development in your employees is the real reward. Playing a fundamental role in the progression of someone’s career brings an unparalleled level of joy and satisfaction. You’ve been with them every step of the way, through wins and dips, and then you get to experience a vicarious rush of excitement when they achieve their goals.

Episode Highlights

Always quantify progress and set goals

“I learned that you have to always quantify and set goals for people. They all have to know what the next step is; you have to let them know what it is. We all know that the ultimate goal is for you to be a really good salesperson. But as a manager, it’s my job to let you know what the very next goal is. And then once we achieve that, then what the goal after that is. […]

The key is breaking down those ultimate goals and the product goals and the process goals. If you achieve those process goals, it makes the achievement of the product goals more likely, and achieving the product goals makes the achievement of the ultimate goal more likely.”

The challenges of being a Managing Director

“You also have to be a black belt at compartmentalizing — understanding whether this problem really is as important and urgent as you think it is. You figure out how to compartmentalize and solve an issue. Maybe there’s a problem that you’re incredibly stressed about, but you have to be able to go from dealing with that problem to your next meeting with a manager that’s absolutely killing it and be the cheerleader that you ought to be for that manager. 

So I think, in general, you have to keep the big picture in mind, and you also just have to become a specialist at understanding how important a given problem really is and what the exact action is that needs to be taken to solve that problem.”

Key qualities in a great Direct Manager

“Do you get more fulfillment out of helping other people achieve their goals or achieving your own goals? If the answer is that you don’t get more fulfillment out of helping other people achieve their goals, you shouldn’t be a DM. So that’s the first thing that I look for. And then I look for somebody that can do the work. I need you to perform as an SDR, because you really need to show mastery of your current role to find yourself in a role where you teach other people how to do that role. So mastery of the current role is important, but also do you have the muscle to take on more work? And so I’m looking for people that are going above and beyond the SDR role and finding ways to add to their plate.”

Transcript: 

[00:00:00] Jackson Hawkins: I learned that you have to always quantify and set goals for people. They have to know what the next step is. You have to let them know, yeah, we all know what the ultimate goal is, that you want to be a really good salesperson, but as a manager, it’s my job to let you know what the very next goal is.

[00:00:15] Marc Gonyea: Jackson Hawkins, managing director of the Austin, Texas office joining us today, Chris. 

[00:00:22] Chris Corcoran: Rock, Chalk, J. Hawk. 

[00:00:27] Jackson Hawkins: How’s it going? 

[00:00:28] Chris Corcoran: What’s up, man? 

[00:00:30] Jackson Hawkins: Not much.

[00:00:31] I’m excited to be here with you today. 

[00:00:33] Marc Gonyea: Likewise. 

[00:00:34] Chris Corcoran: Was nice to be in your office. Then that game of volleyball last night, the Couchbase crew. 

[00:00:39] Jackson Hawkins: Yeah. Marc played volleyball for the first time in 20 years, he said, and a few minutes in, he was diving all around the place. Chris did not bring workout clothes, so he was sitting there in a long-sleeve button-up shirt and pants, watching from the sidelines. 

[00:00:54] Chris Corcoran: Observation move. 

[00:00:55] Jackson Hawkins: You were a good emotional support, though.

[00:00:57] Yeah. He’s waiting for the next time. 

[00:00:59] Marc Gonyea: Exactly. Yeah. You’re the first MD who’s done this and I think it’d be good for, I think we got people listening or who might consider being an MD one day. We want to hear your story, right? ‘Cause you run an office, a big office, getting bigger and people want to talk about it.

[00:01:20] How did this guy get into this role and why, kind of where he came from. 

[00:01:24] Jackson Hawkins: Yeah. 

[00:01:25] Marc Gonyea: Let’s talk about that stuff, about a little bit where you came from, where’d you, where’d you grow up? What were you like as a kid a little bit, let’s get into that a little bit. 

[00:01:31] Jackson Hawkins: Grew up in Houston, Texas, just north of there. Yeah.

[00:01:36] Started, I was, my whole life as a kid was about sports, so, started playing sports, I think my, my dad first got me on a baseball team when I was four years old and I was the kid that was, you know, going to baseball practice, changing in the car to go to soccer practice, turn on the car to go to basketball practice.

[00:01:55] My parents, best thing they ever did was, they embraced this philosophy that, if he’s busy with sports then he doesn’t have time to get into trouble, right? 

[00:02:05] Marc Gonyea: That’s, that’s a good model. 

[00:02:06] Jackson Hawkins: Yeah. I planned to emulate it with my kids one day. But, because of that, I grew up hypercompetitive. 

[00:02:16] Chris Corcoran: Yesterday he was yelling at people.

[00:02:18] Jackson Hawkins: Oh yeah. I get intense for sure. And what’s funny is, as I was telling Chris, Chris had this moment. I said, “Chris, my, my intensity far outweighs my skills,” and he’s like, “That’s a metaphor for life, you know?” But yeah, I grew up playing all different types of sports. My, my, my main sport was baseball up until high school,

[00:02:41] but going, when I played football, baseball, basketball, soccer, some tennis, and, and I wasn’t especially good at any of them, but going into high school, I was, like, four foot eleven, 97 pounds, you know, I was really, really small and I wasn’t sure if I could really do any sports at the high school level,

[00:03:06] and, the, I went into, I did this conditioning camp in the summer and the wrestling coach found me. He was like, “Hey, you’re pretty strong for your size, like, have you ever thought about wrestling?” I didn’t know anything about it, so I said, like, ” I think I’m too small to really play sports.” He’s like, “No, we have weight classes, and there’s 103-pound weight class.”

[00:03:23] And, as a kid that had always been the smallest person on the field, just trying to make it work against bigger guys, the idea of going against somebody that’s my size, I was like, “Yes, absolutely.”

[00:03:33] Marc Gonyea: Hypercompetitive hundred-pound kid.

[00:03:35] Jackson Hawkins: Yeah. Yeah. And, so, started wrestling. There were a lot of kids that were, that have been wrestling for, since they were six, seven years old, you know, so, kind of, like, a repetitive theme of my life is starting behind everybody else in, in whatever endeavor and just, you know, came to extra practices, you know, worked extra hard, built up to [00:04:00] being on varsity in my second year,

[00:04:01] and before, before I left, I was the team captain in my senior year. 

[00:04:05] Chris Corcoran: Have you ever grabbed out of the 103-pound weight class? 

[00:04:08] Jackson Hawkins: So, I went from, I ended up, my senior year, I think I wrestled 140 pounds. So, I was, I was doing some, I was, and I was also cutting a little bit of weight to get there, which is, is an unfortunate, unfortunate part of wrestling,

[00:04:21] but, so, I was, I was doing the whole, like, I would come in on Monday and I’d be 10 pounds overweight, need to lose 10 pounds by Thursday, and, yeah, it was, it was wild, but there’s a, there’s a quote from Dan Gable, who’s, like, this amazing American wrestling hero, he said, like, “After wrestling, everything in life is easy.”

[00:04:40] Because, I’ve yet to find, you guys know that I’ve had other athletic adventures or endeavors, and I still have found nothing that, that compares to a two-and-a-half-hour wrestling practice, I mean, it’s just insane. So, yeah. 

[00:04:57] Marc Gonyea: Wresters are crazy, they are. 

[00:04:58] I mean, I was going to ask you, so, what have you learned?

I will ask you to leave right there, then give a quote before I got there. What, what is, what has touched you?

[00:05:08] Jackson Hawkins: You know, when, when you go, when it’s, when it’s a part of your normal life to, to go and you’re, you’re wrestling against people, and you guys know that I, that I went on to do other martial arts and things like that. When, when you’re used to getting humbled and in some ways, like, humiliated by people on the re, on a regular basis, it’s really, really difficult to have,

[00:05:34] I mean, an ego after that. And, I think that ego is, is an enemy, like, it’s, it, it hampers progress, and whenever, whenever, whenever somebody’s grinding your face into the mat or, you know, choking you out or whatever it is, you know, you realize that you’re, you’re not really, you’re not, you’re not really shit.

[00:05:55] And, so, you don’t take yourself so seriously and you understand that you always have room for [00:06:00] improvement, and I think a lot of people, they get to go through life and they never have that ego check in that sort of way, absolutely.

[00:06:06] Marc Gonyea: And some people say, “I’ve never done a sport like that,” although every now and then, even at RAs I’ve toyed with the idea of trying it.

[00:06:13] Jackson Hawkins: Yeah. 

[00:06:15] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. I know. I know wrestling. Anyways, all right, all right, so, all right. So, you do this stuff in high school, what does Jackson, future Jackson, thinks was going to go on with himself? 

[00:06:26] Jackson Hawkins: He thought it was going to be easy. Jackson Hawkins, at that time, I thought I was going to go to a good school, I was going to crush school because I, you know, I was pretty intelligent in high school,

[00:06:40] and, and then I would just get a high-paying job and it would, like, my, my path would be very, very straight and narrow. And, I did get into a good school. I started at the University of Texas at Austin, right here, and it hit me like a freight train, because, even though I was intelligent, I was mistaking, you know, talent for skill, pretty much.

[00:07:01] I was intelligent, but I didn’t work hard. I didn’t know how to study, and, and University of Texas just ran me over. And, I didn’t, I didn’t flunk out, but it was almost like a mutual breakup, you know, like, “You’re, you’re about to get kicked out,” I was like, “I’m just gonna go,” and, and, so, at that time I dropped out of school. And, so, I started as a petroleum engineering major because it was a very pragmatic choice, based on my, well, my dad told me, “You should be petrol engineering major,”

[00:07:33] and that was also a thing with, with UT, is after a while they’re like, “Hey guy, you’re not taking any engineering courses,” so I switched to economics, and I was about to switch to advertising before I, before I left UT, and I took some time off, I was working, like, odd jobs. These guys like to give me, like to give me a lot of shit because they’ll bring up some random thing [00:08:00] and I’ll know about it because I did a job.

[00:08:03] I worked at a flower shop for awhile. I waited tables. I worked in a soda can factory. I was a maintenance guy on the golf course, things like that. Took a couple of years off, went to Austin Community College, right, did fairly well. 

[00:08:17] Chris Corcoran: But, never moved, never moved back to Houston? 

[00:08:19] Jackson Hawkins: No, no, parents wanted that.

[00:08:21] Chris Corcoran: You liked Austin and stayed here. 

[00:08:25] Jackson Hawkins: Yeah, and went to Austin Community College, was majoring in psychology. I love psychology, you know, it’s, it’s the, it’s the study of being human. I found it, I found it so interesting. Like, I’ve always considered myself a pretty emotionally intelligent, and reached a point where I thought I was ready to graduate and went and talked to them, did, like, a degree audit,

[00:08:47] and they said, “No, you have, like, two or three semesters left.” And, so, I said, “Okay, well I quit again,” and I just quit. And, at that time I said, “You know what? College isn’t for me.” And I, I [00:09:00] was thinking, like, “Ah, you know, I don’t, I don’t fit into this little box of college and all that stuff,” and I kind of floundered for a little while.

[00:09:07] I decided that I was going to be a professional athlete and I was training in mixed martial arts. I started taking fights. I was taking boxing matches, doing jujitsu tournaments. I love MMA, and there was a point where I remember thinking like, “Yeah, yes, I’m athletic, but I, I’m also really intelligent and I need to find a way, like, I owe it to myself to find a way that I can, you know, make a career with, with my brain, because this is not sustainable.”

[00:09:40] Went back to school and about the time that I went back to school, I also blew out my knee catastrophically in the jujitsu tournament, so then that really had me committed, committing to school. Found Southwestern University, just north of Austin, it’s a private school, and luckily they were able to give me lots of scholarships,

[00:09:58] and I went back [00:10:00] there and I realized that I had sort of a blank slate, right, you know, they only care about the GPA of the school that you graduated from. And, so, I went in and started saying, “Right now I technically have a 4.0.” And, I fought to keep that, and at the time that I, that I graduated, so, I was working, I was working as a live-in caretaker.

[00:10:20] I was working 55, 60 hours a week. I was going to school full-time, and for the first semester of that, at least, I was training eight or nine times a week. And, throughout that time at Southwestern, I kept that 4.0. I was the only person to graduate, it’s a very academically rigorous school. I graduated with a 4.0, I graduated number one in my class, and then brought me to, to memoryBlue. 

[00:10:44] Marc Gonyea: What a journey. 

[00:10:45] Jackson Hawkins: Yeah. 

[00:10:46] Chris Corcoran: That’s cool then. 

[00:10:47] Marc Gonyea: It’s like Forrest Gump. What did that, what did all that teach you though? Like, so when you’re coming out of school, so you did all, you’ve done all these things, you tried all these things, so you, when you got out of Southwestern, you’re dealt with, trying to be a fighter? 

[00:11:01] Jackson Hawkins: Yeah.

[00:11:01] So, I’ve blown out my knee in January or July of 2017, and I graduated in May of 2018. So, it was really, like, halfway through my time at Southwest that I hurt my knee. But, really, you know, fighting, there’s the top, only the top 1% of guys really make a living out of it. And, for me, I always knew, I always knew I wasn’t going to be one of these guys that fights on regional promotion.

[00:11:28] It’s US, it’s UFC or Boston. There were guys in the UFC that struggled to make a living. And, I was training with some guys in the UFC and regularly, and, and they would have other people from the UFC or big organizations come through, and, and I would, I would do okay, you know, I, I was like, “Okay, I have the potential to be able to compete with this level of person.”

[00:11:47] But then, once, once my knee blew out, it’s really hard to come back from that at a 100%. I had already been having injury issues and I kind of needed that, that was, that was a wrap, and I wasn’t interested in taking brain [00:12:00] trauma for no reason. You know, if I’m going to take a brain trauma, it’s going to be worth it.

[00:12:04] I’m going to, I’m going to, I want to get to the elite level. So, once the knee went out, I knew that was, that was it. 

[00:12:11] Chris Corcoran: All right. And, so, what, what did you, you graduated first in your class with a degree in what? 

[00:12:17] Jackson Hawkins: Communication studies.

[00:12:18] Chris Corcoran: Communication studies. And, so, you went back, you got serious about school, very serious about your academics, exceptionally high level.

[00:12:26] What’d you want to do when you graduated? 

[00:12:28] Jackson Hawkins: I knew it was, it was probably going to be sales. I was, so it’s funny. I always remember something that you said. So, my dad did sales and he always told me, like, “I think that you would be really good at this.” I remember you telling me one time, like, “Well, my dad flew helicopters and I don’t know the first thing about flying helicopters.” But, I was also surrounded by a lot of people.

[00:12:53] Or, at that time were telling me, “If you don’t do sales, you’re crazy.” So I, I wanted to get into sales and I knew that [00:13:00] one day I wanted to get into leadership because part of my, part of my nine years and, and mixed martial arts was, was coaching. I coach people at Bellator, if you guys have ever heard of that organization, and, you know, I, I coached some, some high-level fighters, and I loved coaching, I loved. 

[00:13:20] Chris Corcoran: What’d you like about it? 

[00:13:22] Jackson Hawkins: There was, you know, from a community, having a background in communication and psychology, third, I see people like puzzles, right? And, if you were trying to teach someone something, you can’t just convey the information in a way that you would understand, you have to meet them on their level.

[00:13:41] You have to, really, in order to do that, you have to figure out what makes them, and, and how you can convey this information in a way that they’re going to absorb, and that was, that was, like, always a really interesting puzzle to me, and, so, I would work with people, you know, not only would I work with, you know, pretty, pretty high-level fighters, but I would [00:14:00] work with people who are throwing their first punch in their first day of boxing class, you know, and you would look at it and you say, “This is, ooh, this is rough,

[00:14:07] you know, I don’t know if it’s going to click with this person,” and you work with them, and after an hour they’re throwing a crisp jab, you know, and I loved that, that sense of fulfillment. I loved the idea that this person is doing something right now that they probably never thought they’d be able to do, and I had some part in that, and I always enjoyed that.

[00:14:27] Chris Corcoran: Crisp jab.

[00:14:29] Jackson Hawkins: I can teach you to throw a crisp jab. 

[00:14:32] Marc Gonyea: You were told by mentors, sales, your dad was in sales, you’re like, “All right, I’m going to go to sales.” What were you going to sell? Had you had any idea? 

[00:14:41] Jackson Hawkins: I was literally like, “Give me a, give me a widget and I’m going to figure it out.” Also, I graduated from college at 30 years old, you know?

[00:14:48] So, it’s like, great, you graduated from college, you know, you graduated number one in your class, whatever, but you guys know there’s all the, I was distinctly aware of the fact that there’s all these young studs [00:15:00] out there that are graduating at 21, 22 years old. And, so, I immediately felt behind,

[00:15:05] right, and I had to make up for lost time, and sales seems like a place where, if you go and you’re willing to outwork the people to the left and right of you, and you’re willing to be coachable and experiment, you really make your own destiny, right? I knew I couldn’t spend two or three years getting somebody else’s coffee before I had an opportunity to, like, really make a career for myself,

[00:15:26] right? And, so, I’m, I resolved that sales was the place for me and I was going to go and just outwork that person to the left and right from me.

[00:15:34] Chris Corcoran: And, so, then, we, how did, how did you find your sales job? What’d you do? 

[00:15:39] Jackson Hawkins: So, first of all, I took some time. After I, after I graduated, I was finishing up this stint of working 55, 60 hours a week, going to school full-time,

[00:15:50] it was crazy, I was sleeping maybe three and a half, four hours a night because I was having to, I was studying until late at night, and I was assisting two guys with [00:16:00] muscular dystrophy, one of them would go to bed at 11:30, the other one would wake up at 5:30, 6:00 AM, right, and there I would also have to be studying in there somewhere.

[00:16:11] And, so, by the time I graduated from college, I was just tired and I had a little bit of money saved up. And, so, I just, I took off, like, five or six months and I went and traveled the country. You guys know I do these survival trips. I went to, I went to Alaska for 10 days, went to Idaho, went to Colorado, just spent a lot of time in the mountains,

[00:16:31] and then came back and started my job search. And, started interviewing in tech because tech is, is the future, you know, it’s not going anywhere. And I, I knew that there was a lot of money to be made in tech. Interview, I remember I interviewed with another company for an SDR position, thought I crushed the interview and they passed on me.

[00:16:56] I went [00:17:00] in there, they had pink, long tables and it looks, and it was such a colorful office and it looked so cool, and then I, and I, I thought I crushed the interview and I’m like, “Okay, I’m ready. I’m ready to get going on this career,” you know, after taking my break, I was just ready to get going, and then they passed on me and I was heart-broken.

[00:17:22] And now when I think back on it, and it’s like, I’m so glad that, that they passed on, as they should have. 

[00:17:28] Chris Corcoran: So, what happened after that? 

[00:17:30] Jackson Hawkins: So, I see a job opening for, for a position at, at memoryBlue as, as an SDR. I reach out and the person that contacted me, it was somebody that’s still here today, Bailey Esparza.

[00:17:42] Marc Gonyea: Wow. 

[00:17:44] Jackson Hawkins: I think you’re supposed to ring that bell.

[00:17:46] Chris Corcoran: It’s only for people who left.

[00:17:56] Jackson Hawkins: So, she reached out to screening me [00:18:00] and, and I remember going through the interview process. I interviewed with Dotun Adetutu and I interviewed with Nimit Bhatt who’s still here, and with Christina Ierullo and.

[00:18:15] Marc Gonyea: She’s coming today. 

[00:18:16] Jackson Hawkins: Oh really? Oh, great. Yeah. And, so, I interviewed with them,

[00:18:20] I remember, I remember in my interview with Dot, I wanted to show that I was researched, and, so, I went and, you know, I love it when candidates look on LinkedIn and ask me about my history and things like that, but after getting, after getting denied by this other company, I was like, “I’m pulling all the stops.” I go in,

[00:18:41] and I can’t believe I didn’t creep them out, ’cause I flat-out stalked Dot, and I remember talking to Christina about the calls that she went to and things like that. With Dot, I found Dot’s old MySpace page, and I went through there and I found a, I found a video of Dot lip sinking and dancing to an old rap song called “Lean Wit It, Rock Wit It”,

[00:19:05] and I brought it up in the interview and Dot turned so red, he was like, “I did not even know that page still existed. I have to go and, and, and delete that.” But, I went through my, my interview with them and because of the growth paths at memoryBlue I really felt like it was a place that I can make up for lost time, right?

[00:19:24] Like, there are, there were other positions that I was starting to look at that I knew I could maybe go make a little bit extra money, things like that, but, I w, my main motivation is, I’m eight years behind, so I have to make up for lost time. And, I remember being on the phone with Bailey, and we still talk about this all the time.

[00:19:44] Yeah, where, we, we talked about it maybe three weeks ago, and I remember telephoning Bailey, “Bailey, I don’t have the time to make the wrong decision right now. Like, I need to know if this opportunity is really [00:20:00] what I think it is.” And she was like, “Jackson, if you mean what you say about how hard you want to work and, like, what your motivations are for this job,

[00:20:09] so, like, this is an excellent decision for you,” and, and she was absolutely right.

[00:20:14] Marc Gonyea: Oh man. I’ll tell you, man. This is what we do, with the most work that we do here is hire people. 

[00:20:18] Chris Corcoran: Yeah, for sure. I mean, there’s no doubt about it. 

[00:20:21] Jackson Hawkins: For sure. For sure. 

[00:20:22] Marc Gonyea: Let’s give Bailey a little shout-out text. 

[00:20:26] Jackson Hawkins: Okay. 

[00:20:27] Chris Corcoran: So, great. So you, so you, you decided to take Bailey’s word, what happened? 

[00:20:32] Marc Gonyea: I want to hear what was like with the phones. 

[00:20:35] Jackson Hawkins: I almost quit on my second day. So, it doesn’t, it wasn’t the phones. It was that I was coming from, I was coming from this life of cleaning soda can factory and being on a golf course doing maintenance stuff and helping guys around their house live, live a normal life.

[00:20:53] This is my first office job and I get here, and I really thought that it was a huge obstacle for me to [00:21:00] overcome that I didn’t have much experience with tech in general. Like, I’d never used Microsoft Outlook. So, I come in and I’m, like, trying to get set up on Outlook and I got all these emails coming in that don’t have anything to do with me and get, trying to get set up on all these programs and I’m sitting there and I’m just like, I’m in an office,

[00:21:17] and on day two, I was really close to quitting. I was just thinking, like, “I don’t think office,” maybe I was right all those years ago when I said college isn’t for me and all that stuff, and I, and that voice in my head was, like, “An office job isn’t for you.” And, same way that I did with college, I kind of realized that that is just, that’s just weakness coming out.

[00:21:38] That’s that’s, that’s your mind, that’s your ego trying to come up with an excuse to, to protect you from discomfort. And, so, I told myself, “Okay. Give it 30 days. Like, if you, if you want to quit in 30 days, you can walk out.” And, and I’m glad I didn’t quit, but once I got to the phones, I made some, some resolutions whenever, whenever I came in, because I want to get a promotion, that’s, that’s the whole reason that I’m here, you know, I don’t care as much about, you know, the, the little bit of extra money that quota is going to bring me or anything like that. I want to get a promotion, I want to make up for lost time, and I’m a big goal setter, I believe in the product goals and, which is based on results, right?

So, the result is, I want to get promoted, but, like, what does that look like? There’s all these little things that that entails, really, you could say that’s the ultimate goal. Product goals would be like, in order to, to reach my ultimate goal of getting promoted, I probably need to hit quota. That’s a product goal. Process goal is, like, what are the little things that I need to do? What are the little boxes I need to check in order to reach the product goal that’s going to make achievement of the ultimate goal, you know, more likely? And, so, I set some process goals. One of the process goals I had was, because of Ceilidh Kurkoski who you guys are going to talk to.

[00:22:58] She, [00:23:00] on my second day, they gave me a call to listen to, and it was Ceilidh and it was a great call. Kaylee’s a stud. She’s so good, highly capable, and I had heard her on the phone behind me and everything like that, and I knew that she, she knew what she was doing and she just, she just worked hard too.

[00:23:18] Yeah, and I listened to her calls, great call, and I come out of my training session, I go to Ceilidh and I said, “Ceilidh, we listened to one of your calls in our new-hire training today,” and she turned around, and the first thing that she said was, “What was your honest opinion on it?” And that struck me so much because I didn’t know anything, you know, and Ceilidh had this mentality where she had something to learn from everyone around her, in this person that was on their second or third day,

[00:23:48] it tells you that he listens to a call and her immediate, her immediate response is to look for feedback and that blew me away. And, so, right there, I set a process goal that I need to learn from [00:24:00] all these people around me. And, so, in order to do that, I need to set up at least one, hopefully two 30-minute session with a person around me that I see as a top performer every week and ask them questions, like, “What, I think you’re really good.

[00:24:14] What do you feel like you do especially well, how do you do that? Like, what’s a lesson that you learned that, that you wish you had, you had learned sooner?” Right? Trying to steal their experience. Another process goal that I had is, we have a PM huddle every day where we talk about your numbers for the day.

[00:24:31] And it’s like, “Yeah, what meetings did you book and occur?” But, also how many conversations did you get into, and how many, how many dials did you make?” And, really it all filters down from, from dials, right? You make more dials, you’re gonna get into more conversations. You’re gonna get, you’re going to get more meetings.

[00:24:44] And, so, I made a resolution that there would never be a day that I left here, that somebody on my team made more dollars than me. And, so, there were some times that I came in and I was like, “I made $140 today. Somebody is like, “I really put the title down, I made $169 today. And, they will go back to there or they would go, they would leave,

[00:25:03] I would go back to my desk and I’ll make 21 dials, and I can look you guys right in the face and say there was never a day that I left here and I was in second place on my team. They might’ve booked more than me and they might’ve been better on the phone than me, but I knew that that skill would come with time.

[00:25:20] Marc Gonyea: I’ve never heard about this with, Jackson, started with Nimit, Jackson, little older dude, he used to be a fighter, worked in that business, and then he was also caretaker that he, who the hell is this guy? His work ethic is incredible. 

[00:25:35] Jackson Hawkins: Like, you asked me what I learned from wrestling, fighting and all that stuff, and I learned that there’s always going to be more, someone more talented than me and I’ve, and I might lose, right,

[00:25:45] that’s, like, I got beat up in front of a crowd before, but I will not be outworked, and, and that was something that I brought into this, and that was really, like, a key to me getting promoted. 

[00:25:58] Chris Corcoran: So, whose, whose team were you on, what client? Tell us a little bit about this.

[00:26:02] Jackson Hawkins: I was on, I was on Dot’s team for about three days.

[00:26:05] Chris Corcoran: Okay. 

[00:26:06] Jackson Hawkins: And then he said, “I think,” he’s like, “Ah,” he took me to lunch, he was like, “I think that you might be switching teams,” and there was a new manager that had just been promoted, named Taylor Ritchie, 

[00:26:17] Marc Gonyea 2: T. Ritch in the house.

[00:26:18] Jackson Hawkins: and I, I remember, I remember thinking, “Oh, I have this new manager,” right? Like, I saw Dot as this experienced manager, I have this new manager and I’m probably getting the short end of the stick here. And, T. Ritch, it didn’t take long for her to establish herself as a leader,

[00:26:35] and someone that really knew what she was talking about with me, and I loved being on a new team, right, like, Dot had probably 8 or 10 people on his team, and I was one of the first 3 or 4, and so I had all this attention from my manager, and I’m sure that I drove T. Ritch crazy because I was asking her questions all the time.

[00:26:55] But, I remember, I remember I went over to the T. Ritch’s team and I booked [00:27:00] my first meeting on that team, and I immediately walked over to Dot’s team and I, and, in the middle of less, I walked over at Dot’s and said, “You made a huge mistake.”

[00:27:16] He was like, “It wasn’t up to me, man.” 

[00:27:19] Chris Corcoran: “You should have fought for me.” 

[00:27:20] Jackson Hawkins: And, putting out, it worked out as it should have. I was, I sat next to T. Ritch for pretty much my entire routine year as an SDR. I asked her questions all the time. I went on to ACME ticketing as, as a client, and then, as a certain point, I, I, at a certain point I had, like, a floater client on the side, that is still with us today in predictive analytics,

[00:27:46] yeah, and, yeah, I just, I, I worked really hard and T. Ritch was, she was, she was great because I don’t, I don’t really want to protect my ego and T. Ritch certainly wasn’t interested in [00:28:00] protecting my ego. So, if we did a call about, she would, she would eviscerate me, like, she had high expectations for me from the jump,

[00:28:07] and, and that was, that was exactly what I needed, and I remember, we would go into, and we do a thing here still to this day for our office call-abouts where we pick out, you guys know how it works, pick out a handful of recordings at random, and we go into the same room or the same Zoom room and listen to him as a, as an office,

[00:28:25] and it’s nerve wracking, and I remember hearing my calls and shaking and thinking, “Wow, how, how come you’re saying so much?” It’s making me nauseous, how much I say, and, but I loved those sessions, whether my call is getting broken down or not to hear Ceilidh Kurkoski or, like, Josh Harris was somebody that I looked at and I was like, “This guy,” he, he was such a, such a weird little guy,

[00:28:51] he has an Alabama accent, but, true, he could build rapport like no other, and he was the person that taught me that [00:29:00] just from hearing him, that rapport is, is amazing, like, that’s the style that I’ve developed as an SDR. 

[00:29:07] Marc Gonyea: I was going to ask you about that. 

[00:29:09] Jackson Hawkins: Yes, like, rapport or my style? 

[00:29:11] Marc Gonyea: Your style. So, so, so you’re, you know, an old guy, new kid on the block, getting in the sales, right, which would, you kind of knew you’re not new, but, like, people would tell you to do this and you’re thrown into it, how did you, like, a fighting style, what was your style? What was your little superpower? 

[00:29:28] Jackson Hawkins: I came into sales and people, I figured people told me that I should get into sales because

[00:29:33] maybe I, like, I’m fairly personable, right, and I decided that, no matter what I do, I can’t lose that on the phone because they get, like, you’re given a sheet music of what people would call “script”, and there were other people around me that would just kind of become a walking version of that script, I didn’t understand that because it was like, “Why did you want to get into sales?

[00:29:52] You have to hold onto that personality, that charisma, the charm whatever you want to call it, that, how did you you interview for this job in the first place?” And, [00:30:00] so, I kind of resolved that I’m going to keep that and whenever you get on your first cold call and somebody picks up, it’s terrifying, but cold calling is not something that you can,

[00:30:10] halfway, it’s like getting into cold water, you can’t tiptoe into it because you’ll never fully commit. You just have to take the plunge, you know? And, so, I, I was like, “Okay, I mean, I’m going to, I’m going to go into this. I’m going to take the plunge, and I’m going to maintain that level of personality that, that brought me here in the first place.”

[00:30:28] And so, I was, I was a rapport builder. I was making, I was calling for ACME ticketing, I remember I was making corny jokes, you know, like, I would say, “Hi, this is Jackson from ACME Ticketing, am I catching you at a bad time?” And they’d be like, “What’s the name of your company?” I’m like, “ACME, yeah, you know, it sounds like I should be selling the handbills or dynamite or something like that,”

[00:30:49] and, and sometimes it would fall flat on its face, and sometimes it works. Yeah. And, so I was, I was a rapport builder. I remember one time [00:31:00] we were, see, you like it. 

[00:31:02] Chris Corcoran: It’s hilarious. Yeah, because I love, I love Louis too. 

[00:31:06] Jackson Hawkins: So, we were in Caldwell’s one time and I, I gave another SDR the, the advice, like, you’re not building a rapport, like, you should, you should build some rapport and Sam Ott, he speaks up and you guys know Sam, he’s the opposite of a rapport builder.

[00:31:22] Sam Ott is, he’s a sales machine and he’s an automaton, and he got in front of everybody, he goes, “Jackson, I know that you do well on this campaign where you call people at museums and NPOs and things like that, not all of us can call and just sound, like, rosy, flowery on the phone.” He’s not worried about your feelings.

[00:31:48] He’s a genius. I hope he doesn’t hear me say that because I still, I still hang out with Sam sometimes. I don’t even know why I said that, but, yeah. But, but yeah, I was, I was a rapport builder, for sure. I [00:32:00] was, I was cracking jokes and I always, I tried to remember that, whether or not you’re talking to someone, a level manager or a C-level executive, the other person, that person on the other end of the phone is exactly that. They’re a person, right?

[00:32:12] Like, there’s, there, you have more in common with them than, than differences. Just because they maybe are further along in their career, like, they got up just like you, they commuted through traffic and they hated every second of it, you’re sitting at a desk, you know, there’s, there’s so much that you have in common, they have motivators, they have things that bother them throughout their day, there are things that make them unhappy, they have stressors outside of work.

There’s so much to build rapport on, and if you, if you become the walking version of that script, you’re, you’re missing all that overlap. And, so, I wanted to create that, that person-person connection, because if I didn’t, if I didn’t book you and that call, I wanted you to, I want it to be able to call you back in four weeks and say, “Hey, it’s Jackson,” they would be, they would say, “Hey Jackson, how’s it going today?” And, they would remember me. And, so, I was trying to create many relationships and there were so many of my books that, that came from a six conversation with the person, you know, I, I would, yeah, especially on that, and, and, you know, I heard you talk about this with Huy Nguyen and his, and his podcast. ACME had the situation where we didn’t have that many accounts, right, we didn’t have, the pool’s not that large, and, so, I would, if I wanted to make 150 calls in a day, that probably meant I was calling the same 75 people twice,

[00:33:35] and then, tomorrow I’m going to call them twice again, and, and so, every conversation that you have is precious and you gotta, you gotta squeeze everything out of it that you can. And, so, there were people that I would talk to and it would be, “Hey, not right now,” or “I’m not interested.” “Okay. I’ll send you an email.”

[00:33:52] “Great. I’ll follow up on that email.” “Yeah, it doesn’t make sense for us right now.” “Okay. When?” “Call me back in four weeks,” call back in four weeks.” “Hey, [00:34:00] Dan, I know that you said that, you know, you’re under water with this project and this might be a better time to call and look at calendars.” “No, this project’s still going on,” we talk five or six times,

[00:34:11] and then, finally, I would, rapport builder, I’d be like, “Dan, I’m going to be honest with you. I think I’ve taken probably 45 minutes of your time at this point, and I feel bad about it. I don’t know if we can even help you. Why don’t we take 15 minutes just to figure out if I should even be harassing you like this?”

[00:34:27] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, Jackson, you get people to put time in, and then you put the time in, you get out things that other people don’t. The time you put in it, that’s where your credibility is. It’s, like, depositing the checks, depositing the checks, you might give it to them, like, “Okay.” I mean, it’s not about people who are going to go away. No, no. It’s, like, you’re extracting value along the way that you can, like, you have a legitimate solution to talk about that actually could help. 

[00:34:53] Jackson Hawkins: Every conversation I would save quotes from them, I put into my notes and then I would literally take 10 seconds to write [00:35:00] up what the first 30 seconds of my calls is gonna look like on the next conversation.

[00:35:03] Marc Gonyea: Using people’s words that they’ve said to you in a follow-up conversation, it’s, like, fucking magic. It’s, like, being a wizard. 

[00:35:09] Jackson Hawkins: Absolutely. 

[00:35:10] Marc Gonyea: So, that was your, that was your style. 

[00:35:12] Jackson Hawkins: Yeah. 

[00:35:12] Marc Gonyea: Good. 

[00:35:13] Jackson Hawkins: Yeah. 

[00:35:13] Marc Gonyea: So, who w, when you were, when you were an SDR, who’d you look up to, which SDRs you think were good?

[00:35:19] Jackson Hawkins: I was, I was amazed by Ceilidh Kurkoski. I was amazed by, by Josh Harris. 

[00:35:26] Marc Gonyea: Josh style, for sure. 

[00:35:28] Jackson Hawkins: Yeah, he, he was, he was somebody that I was constantly looking at. We had Anthony. He’s the leads couch, I think Anthony, I believe Rodriguez is his last name. He now works for a long-time client, Couchbase.

[00:35:43] Marc Gonyea: Okay. Oh yeah. Yeah. 

[00:35:46] Jackson Hawkins: Tony. 

[00:35:46] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, Tony. Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:35:48] Jackson Hawkins: He was great to listen to. I would, I, I also had, on my row, I have Bruce Horner. 

[00:35:56] Marc Gonyea: Oh yeah. 

[00:35:59] Jackson Hawkins: Bruce [00:36:00] was the person that I’m most, like, emulated, that I, I, Bruce was walking around, he was talking with his hands, there was nobody that works harder than Bruce, right, and I was like, “If I can just, if I can just keep pace with this guy, like, I’m gonna, you know, like, I’m going to do something in this business.”

[00:36:18] And, and I remember there was a point where I was a few weeks in and I asked something to T. Ritch and Bruce turns around, was like, “I don’t know the answer to your question, but you sound fucking great on the phone, guy.” And I was like, that was, that was a huge moment for me. It was, like, Bruce Nixon. 

[00:36:37] Marc Gonyea: Well, you know what, Bruce wouldn’t track, maybe Bruce, do you, or what I like about Bruce’s style is, he was himself.

[00:36:44] Jackson Hawkins: Yeah. 

[00:36:45] Marc Gonyea: Right? The guy, he kind of brings his true self and you got to take the sales process and the way you roll, but it is refreshing and comforting to see somebody do the work that we do and be kind of their own persons. 

[00:36:58] Jackson Hawkins: You know, also,  this is, not only is it going to make you more effective, but this is a tough job.

[00:37:04] It’s a tough, thankless job. You know, you, you take your lumps out there and if you’re not, if you’re not exhibiting, like, your personality and being true to yourself and having a little bit of fun with it, it’s going to wear you down, right, you got to have fun in the process. And that’s what, that’s what Bruce did. 

[00:37:20] Chris Corcoran: Evils and dynamite. Dynamite. 

[00:37:22] Jackson Hawkins: Yeah, absolutely. 

[00:37:24] Chris Corcoran: So you, how long were you on ACME exclusively? 

[00:37:27] Jackson Hawkins: I was on ACME and then I spent some time on a, on a, on a client that’s with us today, called dotData and they’re, they’re still with us, great client, and that, I was, I was with ACME and ACME was calling people at museums about their ticket admission process,

[00:37:44] right, and it, and they had interesting tech behind it, but it wasn’t that technical of a client. And, so, I recognized that that was a huge area of weakness for me, and if I was going to become a manager, which was my ultimate goal, that, if I didn’t have that background, that was going to be, that was going to be a weakness of every [00:38:00] SDR that I’d ever coached..

[00:38:01] And, so, I pulled T. Ritch into a room and I said, “Hey, If you find the opportunity for me to take on a client that is highly technical, I can’t make any promises as to how I’ll perform on it because I, but because I think I’m really weak in that area, but that’s why I want to do it.” And, so, she found dotData, which is a data science campaign, you know, for, so, for people that don’t know what data science is. I mean, a data scientist, if you, if any of us

[00:38:31] talk real tech, nuts and bolts with a VP of IT, right, it would, we, we probably, we would have a hard time holding the conversation, right, because they’re just specialists in what they do. If that VP of IT turns around and talks to a data scientist, it’s, there’s going to be that same level of gap. Like, a data scientist is a, I think of everything in terms of martial arts,

[00:38:53] so they’re a black belt. I’m a white belt, I’m calling black belt and I got to figure out how to have that conversation. And, that was, [00:39:00] that was an obstacle and a challenge that I was really excited about, and I remember, we went through trainings with dotData and I’m trying to grasp this, and we got to the point where we, where it’s time for me to make my first call,

[00:39:13] and I’m terrified, way more terrified than I was for my first call with ACME. And, I made my first time, prospect’s name was Sarah Costa, an ultra source, and she picks up the phone and I, 

[00:39:25] Chris Corcoran: Love how you say her name.

[00:39:26] Jackson Hawkins: and I take, I take it, I go through the conversation and there’s a lot to be improved, but I try to pull over that same level of curiosity that I brought from, from ACME and I wasn’t being as rosy,

[00:39:38] right, but I was still trying to create that connection and pitch the meeting, and she said, “Yes,” and I got off the phone and I lost my shit. I was flexing, Mick Foley was, was sitting right here and he knew that I was making my first dial on, and he’s like, “Did you book?” And I was like, “Yeah,” we’re, like, hitting hands,

[00:39:59] I’m, like, going [00:40:00] up and down all the aisles, flexing, and he’s sitting right in front of me and he’s like, “Let’s go, like, I’m ready to make my next dial,” you know? It was, I was so jacked up about booking that meeting. 

[00:40:14] Marc Gonyea: So, how did it feel when she didn’t occur? 

[00:40:17] Jackson Hawkins: I think she occurred, I think she was a reschedule, but I think, I think that she occurred.

[00:40:22] But yeah, it was, you know, coming, coming into this role, it’s really easy for people to think, “I’m not going to be good at it for whatever reason.” For me, it was like, “I don’t know anything about tech, I’ve never used Outlook,” right, and, man, I really have, I really have the odds stacked against me and being able to come in and talk to these people,

[00:40:43] and so, that was this moment of validation that, that you can, you can really do anything in this business if you, you put your mind to it and you’re willing to, to work hard, and like you said, just put, put in the time.

[00:41:54] Chris Corcoran: So, what is it about you and the relationship with people? 

[00:41:58] Jackson Hawkins: Like I said, I always, like, I [00:42:00] always look for mentors, right, and it’s not necessarily somebody that is good at everything that you want to be good at, right? You can have, actually, Tim Ferriss has a book called “Tribe Of Mentors” where he talks about, he talks about individual if you got, if you don’t know who Tim Ferris says, he’s amazing, and he’s all about human optimization, essentially, and the reason he chose the title “Tribe Of Mentors” is because there’s something to be learned from everyone. And, so, instead of choosing one mentor, I typically choose a tribe of mentors that, that I want to learn from, that I want to inc,

[00:42:36] I want to steal from, I want to, I want to absorb their strengths, and, and that’s what was, that’s why relationships are so important with me. Like, there’s that, that quote, it’s, like, it’s something along the lines of, like, if I’ve reached great heights, it’s only because I stood on the shoulders of giants,

[00:42:54] and that’s incredibly important in the development of anything, but especially sales. Yeah. 

[00:43:00] Chris Corcoran: [00:43:00] So, you know, you settle into the role, learn from others, learn how to be an SDR, figured out what you got good at, but you kind of felt like you had these eight years to catch up on. How did you decide what you wanted to do next? Because you’re obviously the MD now, how did you decide kind of where you want to go? 

[00:43:15] Jackson Hawkins: Yeah, that’s a good question. Whenever I came into the SDR role, I mean, we have, like, obviously these multiple growth paths at memoryBlue and I was fair, there was an inkling that I might be interested in account executive, but I was pretty certain that I wanted to get into management, because, during that time that I, that I was competing in sports and things like that, I picked up quite a bit of coaching experience,

[00:43:41] and I felt like I could use that coaching experience and management. I really love the idea of leadership. I found myself, even though I didn’t really have much of an application for it, I’ve found myself reading books about leadership, falling in love with, like, the teachings of, like, Jocko Willink and people like that, so I knew that management was probably going to be the spot for me, and the first time that my manager spoke to me about potentially getting elevated, I was shocked at how quickly it happened, but it was specifically as an account executive, and I said that,” Yeah, of course I’m interested,

[00:44:13] I’d be silly not to be interested, but to be honest with you, I feel like I would heavily prefer management, because of my coaching experience.”

[00:44:22] Chris Corcoran: How quickly did that happen?

[00:44:23] Jackson Hawkins: So, this is something that I talked to candidates all about, all the time, but, the initial conversation about elevation, I was shocked at how quickly it happened. So, I set some goals whenever I came in and we talked about it, one of them was like,” I’ll never have less dial.

[00:44:38] I’ll never be in second place for the day and dials on my team.” And, part of me in the back of my mind, I was wondering, like, “Is this a place where I will work harder than other people, and that won’t be recognized because of my opinion that’s like the worst fate that a person that outworks other people can suffer?”

[00:44:56] And, it was probably six weeks after I started [00:45:00] that Taylor Ritchie pulled me into room and said, “Hey, we think that you’re the total package, like, you’re outworking everybody. We’re curious if, at some point, like, obviously it’s too early to promote you right now, but at some point, would you be interested in being an account executive for memoryBlue?” So, that conversation was, probably six weeks after I started. 

[00:45:18] Marc Gonyea: An AE for memoryBlue, not a DM? 

[00:45:22] Ok. 

[00:45:23] Jackson Hawkins: And, at that point I said, “Of course I’m interested, but to be honest with you, I’d be more interested in management. Like, I want to lead a team,” and about probably four months into my tenure, Dotun Adetutu, he put in, or, like, it, kinda, like, leaked out that that Dot was going to be moving on to another position,

[00:45:45] and I was in this place where I was like, ” I’m probably way too green to really throw my hat in the ring,” but I got very political about this. Like, I recruited Dot as a champion and then I recruited Taylor Ritchie as a champion, and then I [00:46:00] went to, Marc,  I recruited you as a champion, you came down for a visit and I was like, “Tell me what I need to do to become a DM.” And, you were like, “It doesn’t really matter to me,” but I was thinking, “Of course, Marc, but if you tell Nimit you really like me, then that’s going to help me out a lot.” And then I spoke to Nimit and I let him know, “Hey, I understand that it would probably make a lot more sense if I was coming to you with this conversation in two or three months, but the opportunity’s here now,

[00:46:26] and I just want to let you know that I’m coming forward.” And, so, I was bugging Nimit every single day, and I have idea whenever I talked to other, other people that are wanting to get promotions, if you want a promotion, just start doing the job as much as you possibly can right now, like, start your training, get all the training that you can, start leading a team, whatever,

[00:46:49] and, so, I started taking huddles, Taylor Ritchie, she had her 3K holiday, she went to Italy for three weeks and I said, “Don’t tell any other DMs to help with your team at all. Like, I’m going to run the team for three weeks,” and I ran the team for three weeks and I think that we did halfway decent and I pretty much made it to where Nimit was,

[00:47:09] I was trying to force his hand as much as possible, and it took, like, another six weeks before he came to me and said, “Yeah, I want to move forward with you as a DM,” and I started as a DM a couple of weeks after that, so I was right about six months into my tenure that I became a manager.

[00:47:27] Marc Gonyea: Corcoran, what are your thoughts on that, not waiting around to get promoted, to start to doing the job, for picking up pieces of it?

[00:47:35] Chris Corcoran: I, I mean, the way that I would phrase that is, make it difficult for your manager to not promote you, as opposed to just sitting around, waiting for someone to tap you on the shoulder, no, proactively do exactly what you did, Jackson, because you made it very difficult, because Taylor was gone for three weeks, you were producing, who else is Nimit gonna pick? 

[00:47:54] Jackson Hawkins: Yup. Yeah, and that’s what I wanted to do, and not just make it difficult for them to not choose you, but also, at [00:48:00] the same time, I mean, we talk to prospects all the time and, like, one of the main reasons that they say no is pain of change, right? If you have a solution that has less pain of change than another solution that they’re looking at, you become much more appealing. So, if you get a head start on all that training and that person that’s making that decision goes, “Well, if I promote this guy, there’s way less pain of change, because he’s already gotten a head start on all this training,” you become the appealing choice.

[00:48:28] Marc Gonyea: Yeah, make it difficult or make it easy. 

[00:48:30] Jackson Hawkins: Yeah. 

[00:48:31] Marc Gonyea: Depending how you look at it. Right, and tell us about the DM job. So, for many people listening, they don’t know what that job is. Maybe break that down job for a little bit. 

[00:48:38] Jackson Hawkins: Yeah, delivery manager position at memoryBlue. This is a position that you really have two primary responsibilities. You kind of sit as the middle person between a client that is coming to memoryBlue for help with lead generation and the SDRs that are working on behalf of the client. And, so, your two primary responsibilities [00:49:00] really are, one performance management on the SDR side,

[00:49:04] right, get the most out of them, and then also, on the client side, managing that client relationship. And, so, in the course of that position, I feel like you really, in a short amount of time, like, I always think about things in terms of belt levels because of a martial arts background,

[00:49:20] it’s a way to develop, get a black belt in both performance management and customer relationship management and, in a short amount of time. So, you might run a team of 8 or 10 SDRs over the course of a handful of client campaigns, and you’re the point person for everything. You’re in charge of strategy,

[00:49:40] you’re in charge of crafting that training for each individual SDRs so you can get the most out of them, you’re in charge of helping that SDR get to their ultimate goal, whether that’s they want to become a recruiter or a manager like you, or an account executive, or get hired up by their client. Yeah, all that stuff is on your shoulders.

[00:49:58] I love the delivery manager.

[00:50:00] Marc Gonyea: [00:50:00] What’s the most challenging part of the job? Is it working with SDRs? Is it working with clients?

[00:50:04] Jackson Hawkins: It depends on the day. On the client side of things, challenge that we often see, I always think of this as, like, if you hire a plumber, right, and you have an issue with your sink, like, I don’t know about you guys, I don’t know the first thing about plumbing. Right? So.

[00:50:22] Marc Gonyea: I really know really about any of that stuff.

[00:50:23] Jackson Hawkins: Okay. It doesn’t make sense to me to hire a plumber, and then, while they’re sitting there with their head underneath my kitchen sink, I’m sitting there going, “Oh, well, what you want to do is this, and I need you to do it this way.” I, I’m not going to tell them how to fix the sink.

[00:50:35] And, you do run into some clients that come to you and they say, “I have this problem. I have this broken sink, but here’s how I want you to fix it,” whenever, it would, optimally, like, best practice would be to let me fix the sink the way that I know works, but lot of clients, they’re a joy to work with.

[00:50:51] I mean, I have, like, these deep connections with clients that I started out with as an SDR that I went on to manage as a delivery manager, that I [00:51:00] now manage as a managing director and they’re still with us. 

[00:51:03] Whenever they come to town, they want to go out for drinks and everything like that.

[00:51:07] But, on the SDR side of things, that’s probably the most challenging, because, as a delivery manager, when you first become a delivery manager, like, as an SDR you only have to figure out how to be successful in your particular style, you have to find one way to be successful, and as a manager, those people are not going to be miniature versions of you.

[00:51:28] That’s something that, that Nimit told me in my first week as a manager, he’s, like, “They’re not miniature versions of you,” so you really have to learn all styles and be able to sell in all styles in order to effectively coach these people and styles that you have, that you never used as an SDR. So,

[00:51:46] tailoring that coaching is the most challenging part of the job, but it’s also the most rewarding part of the job, because then you get to see these people grow into these beasts whenever the first time that you did a role play with them, they couldn’t really get through an opening statement.

[00:51:59] Chris Corcoran: Let’s talk [00:52:00] about that, the fulfillment part of the job. Why is that important to you?

[00:52:03] It’s important to me.

[00:52:05] Jackson Hawkins: That’s why I wanted to get another job. I always tell people whenever they’re looking for a promotion and they’re not sure what they want to do, I say, “Do you get more fulfillment out of achieving your own number or helping someone else achieve their number?” That’s really, like, the litmus test.

[00:52:19] Should you be an account executive or should you be in management? And, which, whatever the answer, it’s great. Like, we have positions for both of those. But I, the answer for me was definitely, I like helping other people. I look at people as a puzzle, and I like to figure out how I can convey information to them to help them grow.

[00:52:35] And, so, like, there’s the story that always comes to mind, and I tell this story to candidates because I love it so much, but Kemi Adetutu, right, Dot Adetutu’s little sister, she was an SDR. We actually spent some time as SDRs together, and then I was promoted in the management and I became Kemi’s manager and something I’m always asking SDRs early in their tenures, “What do you want to do? What’s the goal? Let’s figure out how we can help you work towards a goal, and in order to do that, we need a goal.” And, so, for, months I was asking Kemi, “What’s your goal? What’s your goal?” And she says, “I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

And about three months into my managing, Kemi, she came to a one-on-one and she was really excited and she was like, “Jackson, I got good news for you. I know what I want to do. I know what the goal is.” It’s like, “Okay, what is it?” She’s like, “I want to be a recruiter.” I said, “Okay, great, Kemi, I’m thrilled to hear that. I’m going to be honest with you. You’re nowhere close right now. You have a ton of developing to do.”

[00:53:33] Marc Gonyea: Tough love.

[00:53:34] Jackson Hawkins: Yeah, I was like, you know Kemi Adetutu, she’s a rosy and she’s so sweet, and that was the only thing that she could be on the phone, and she was on a campaign that really catered to that, but she couldn’t be, like, transactional and she couldn’t be brass tacks, and so she had to develop as a sales person and she had to develop her muscle as well, just being able to, to handle the workload and things like that. So, I said, ” You’re nowhere close

[00:53:57] right now, but I want to help you work towards [00:54:00] this and I’m going to be honest with you, like, I’m going to push you really hard.” And, over the course of the next several months, we talked about that every single one-on-one and there were days that Kemi definitely wanted to curse me out for sure,

[00:54:14] but over the course of that time, she developed and there came a point where I was looking at her numbers I was like, ” This woman’s turned into a hell of a salesperson,” and it made sense for me to reach out the head of Talent at the time. And, so, I reached out to him and I said, “Hey, like, I have a person that you want to, that you want to speak with.”

[00:54:33] And he was kind of in a place right now, he’s like, “I’m not sure if I’m adding her to the team, if I do add her to the team, like, there’s a couple of people I have from the DC office on my radar,” and, so, I had to hound him, and, so, I was helping her develop and then I was hounding him, and I finally got him to give her time on his calendar and he started interviewing her and they went through several interviews and I was coaching her for those interviews,

[00:54:55] and then, there came a point where she had an interview on the calendar and, the head of [00:55:00] Talent reached out to me and he said, “Jackson, I just wanted to give you the heads-up that the interview that Kemi has later today, it’s not an interview. I’m going to let her know that she got the position.” And, so, Kemi, she took that call and, in what we call the “glass box” in the Austin office,

[00:55:15] you guys have seen it right out here, it’s an office right outside of our suite, glass walls. And, so, she went in there and I was poking my head around the corner, and this is the part where I was getting a little bit choked up, but I got to see the moment

[00:55:30] that Kemi found out that she got the promotion, that she achieved this goal that we had been working for for 6, 7, 8 months. And, like, we rallied everyone outside of the door and she walked in and we all started cheering and she started crying and maybe I started crying, who knows? It was this moment where, like, it’s moments like that that are the reason that I wanted to get in management because somebody comes to you and they don’t know [00:56:00] anything,

[00:56:00] they have no sales experience whatsoever, and then you get to see them go on to become a recruiter or a manager or an account executive, or receive this bad-ass offer from a client who thinks that they’re worth six figures now, and they’re on a trajectory for a radically better

[00:56:16] life. As a manager, like, I get to selfishly feel like I have some part in that. And, so, yeah, that’s the most fulfilling part of the job for me, for sure.

[00:56:26] Marc Gonyea: I’m going to soak that in, Corcoran. 

[00:56:28] Chris Corcoran: You have no other choice.

[00:56:30] Jackson Hawkins: Yeah. that’s my favorite story, but I’ve got a million of those. 

[00:56:33] Marc Gonyea: I mean,  ’cause that’s, what’s so fascinating about the job. We get folks in the SDR role and the delivery manager works with them and the SDR makes the choice to be worked with and to work hard, but they’re working for us, doing these things that our clients would not even consider them for an interview for, and then we get them to the state where the client’s like, “This person is amazing. I want to bring them on board,” and now they want to hire them, and they wouldn’t have even, even remotely considered even bringing them in for an interview. [00:57:00] And I put a lot of that on the DM. I mean, they’re serious, a lot of credit with the, DMs are the mentors, the leaders, the ass kickers, the high fivers, dealing with everything else with all that, that, getting the SDRs through their periods of self-doubt when they don’t want to do it anymore, or they get pissed off about a quarter raise, I mean, they take them to the promised land. It’s amazing. And that to me is, like, the biggest rush of when I was a DM or even now as the company how it exists now in a current form. What’s, like, the biggest thing you learned as a DM? ‘Cause that’s a legitimate manager job. You know, I know people in their forties, my age, who’ve never interviewed somebody for a job, never had to fire somebody, never had to get, never got someone promoted, and we do these things all the time. Like, this is just saying, it’s like setting the table for dinner around here.

[00:57:45] Jackson Hawkins: So, I would say that a breakthrough moment for me, like, we talked about, like, people aren’t going to be a miniature version of you, right? So, an SDR 

[00:57:59] Marc Gonyea: Thank God. 

[00:57:59] Jackson Hawkins: [00:58:00] I was, yeah, I couldn’t lead a team of Marcs, I was speaking, but, as an SDR I was a big goal setter, and other people need help with that,

[00:58:10] they need help setting those goals, and, like, not just the ultimate goals, like Kemi wanted to be in recruiting, but also those process goals that help you get there. And, so, I think that that’s something that, that I had to come to terms with. And, early on, I would work with people,

[00:58:26] and, like, one-on-ones, like, the person that comes to mind is Allyson Livingston. Like, she’s, she’s out there kicking ass now. Yeah, yeah, she is, she has a killer serve. She was on a campaign, I was managing her as a DM and she went through this plateau, like, I just couldn’t break

[00:58:43] through. It’s not that she wasn’t coachable, like, she was trying, but we just couldn’t figure out how to get her to progress, and we have this plateau of probably a couple of months, something like that, and there was one week where [00:59:00] I figured out that we need to quantify a goal for every week, even if it doesn’t seem quantifiable,

[00:59:07] so we’re working on maybe, like, discovery questions, and she was asking, closing the questions and she was kind of breezing through discovery, and I said, “Okay, Allyson, here’s what I want to do. Next week we’re going to meet again, and I want you to bring me three call recordings where you ask at least four discovery questions, and at least three of those questions are open-ended.” She went out there knowing, and I also kind of probably firmly reinforced that, like, “If you don’t bring me this, I’m going to be upset for sure,” but she went out there, instead of, like, “Oh, I’m going to try to ask more discovery questions,” she was like, “I better go get these recordings for Jackson,

[00:59:44] I have five business days to do it.” And then she brought those recordings the next week, and we set a new goal and she would bring those recordings, and sometimes she would fall one recording short, but every blitz period that she had where she was dialing, it had purpose all of a [01:00:00] sudden outside “I’m going to try to book meetings,”

[01:00:02] and we got out of that plateau and Allyson grew rapidly after that, to the point that she went on to be put on the campaign for our biggest client that hired her out, and she’s still there today. 

[01:00:14] Chris Corcoran: What did you learn? 

[01:00:15] Jackson Hawkins: I learned that you have to always quantify and set goals for people. They have to know what the next step is. You have to let them know, yeah, we all know what the ultimate goal is, that you want to be a really good salesperson, but as a manager, it’s my job to let you know what the very next goal is, and then once we achieve that, then what, what the goal after that is. 

[01:00:34] Chris Corcoran: Jackson, I love the specificity of the goal.

[01:01:07] Jackson Hawkins: It wasn’t just, “Become a better sales person.” It wasn’t just, “Ask better questions.” It wasn’t just, “Ask more open questions.” It’s, “Go to this by this time, That’s really the key, is, breaking down those ultimate goals and the product goals and the process goals, and if you achieve those process goals, it makes the achievement of the product goals more likely and achieving the product goals makes the achievement of the ultimate goal more likely.

[01:01:09] Marc Gonyea: Jackson, where did you learn that? Is this written down anywhere or is it a J. Hawk original?

[01:02:18] Jackson Hawkins: Whenever I was fighting, so, my first fight, I went out there and I thought I was prepared and I’m going to be honest with you, I got my butt kicked in front of, in front of everybody. The guy actually went on, like he just recently fought Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone, he’s had, like, 10 fights in the UFC now.

[01:02:26] What really stood out to me about the fight is, I wasn’t able to bring my true self to the competition, and, so, I got obsessed at that point with sports psychology. Started reading a ton of sports psychology books to get a control on my mindset, and one of those books was called “10‧Minute Toughness”, which is the cheesiest title that you could ever hope for, but it might be the single greatest condensed sports psychology book out there,

[01:02:55] and that author, I wish I could remember his name right now, [01:03:00] he talks about goal-setting. That’s where I learned ultimate goals versus product goals versus process goals, and it’s something that’s helped me out till today. 

[01:03:07] Marc Gonyea: Alright. So, you’re doing this DM thing. When did the thought of taking over the whole operation? ‘ Cause some people might get into the delivery manager role or the manager and say, “Hey, you know what? I really like being an individual contributor more. “

[01:03:19] That, that might tickle my fancy, and I think you probably had those discussions in your mind’s eye, because you’ve got some of your peers, some of your colleagues, right, who were leaving to go work for Couchbase, some people might be going to the sales team, you know, all sorts of things are happening. 

[01:03:34] Jackson Hawkins: Yeah, I came into the company in November of 2018. So, like, November 19, 2018, I came into the company. I was promoted to the DM position June 10th of 2019, and then, and late November of 2019. So, at this point I’ve been a DM for about four months. Nimit Bhatt was my boss and we figured out that Nimit’s is going to be moving to Phoenix [01:04:00] where his wife’s family is,

[01:04:01] and he’s going to be moving on to a new role, he’s now our Head of Sales, killing it, bringing in so many sales deals that I have a hard time keeping up, but, at that time I realized that there was gonna be a void at the MD position and similar as I did whenever I went after the DM position, I was only four months into the SDR role,

[01:04:20] I’m four months into the DM role now, and I went to Kristen Wisdorf who’s just absolute stud and told her, ” Hey, I want this, and I’m prepared to work for it, and I understand that I have a long way to go, and I’m going to be drinking out of a fire hose, but I want you to know that I’m here for it,”

[01:04:38] and Kristen was very on-board with that, and, so, I went through the Kristen Wisdorf, like, multiple-month intensive, where she just absolutely grilled me. She would have meetings with us in the morning and other DMs would go over their numbers and she’s like, “Okay, sounds good.”

[01:04:56] And then she would ask me what my numbers were, and she’d be like, “How many days has it been [01:05:00] since this person booked? How many dials they made yesterday? How many, the dials did they make last Tuesday?” And I just had to know the numbers, like, she would just grill me. And, so, we got to a point where,

[01:05:09] around March, you and Kristen came to me and said, “We’re gonna move forward with the promotion,” and then, about a week later, we all went into quarantine and we had a follow-up conversation where we said, “We’re going to have to put a hold on this for a little bit,” and then, three months later in June of 2020 I was promoted to the MD position.

[01:05:26] So that, it’s been, I don’t know, the whole thing’s been a rocket ship ride, and I’ve just been kind of along for it, but, yeah, that’s when that MD promotion happened, and I love the idea of becoming an MD because I love leadership, and whenever you’re leading SDRs which I like doing,

[01:05:43] you’re teaching them how to be SDRs, but I really love the idea of getting meta with it and teaching managers how to be leaders, actually teaching how thatdership was what stood out to me about 

[01:05:54] Chris Corcoran: What’s the biggest difference between being a DM and MD? 

[01:05:58] Jackson Hawkins: Oh, good question. As a DM, you are overseeing a handful of client campaigns, right? So, actually I had this conversation yesterday with one of my DMs. She asked me what the biggest difference was, and we’re like, whenever an SDR comes to you with a problem, one of their lists is having an issue or something like that,

[01:06:19] they all think that their problem is your biggest problem, right? And, so, you have to handle that, but you also have to prioritize. Well, it’s the same thing as an MD, that your delivery managers, they’re having issues and they’re working through a lot of those issues on their own because they’re killers, but the issues that they can’t work through themselves, they bring to you, and whenever they do, they all think that it’s kind of priority number one. As a DM, you’re solving these problems and you learn how to be incredibly efficient in diagnosing what the exact issue is, like, where you should be applying leverage in order to fix the problem,

[01:06:57] and you also have to be a black belt at [01:07:00] compartmentalizing, like, understanding is this problem really as important and urgent that you think it is, and you figure out how to compartmentalize and solve an issue, and maybe there’s a problem that you’re incredibly stressed about, but you have to be able to go from dealing with that problem to your next meeting with a manager that’s absolutely killing it and be the cheerleader that you ought to be for that manager, so, I think in general, like, you have to keep the big picture in mind and you also just have to become, like, the specialist of understanding how important a given problem really is and what the exact action is that needs to be taken to solve that problem. 

[01:07:37] Chris Corcoran: Jackson, so, one of my favorite stories, when I was visiting Austin and we were going to go to a career fair at Texas A&M, and all about, I believe everything you do is, you’re transmitting a signal. Maybe, I don’t know if you know what I’m talking about, but if you could share with your listeners, kind of, you picking me up to drive from Austin to college station,  Texas, you, you may not even remember.

[01:08:02] Jackson Hawkins: Okay. So, you’re talking about the morning that we drove to college station. All right. Let’s see if I can remember. I’ll probably need you to fill in some gaps, but, you were staying at an Airbnb at the Triangle, which is by the way, that’s right next to where our new office is going to be,

[01:08:17] I’m super excited about that. And, you went to, like, a morning yoga class, I think, and I showed up at, like, 6:30 in the morning to pick you up, and I had a thermos of coffee, and then I think I also brought, like, breakfast tacos or something like that, something for us to launch on.

I recall that you were pretty blown away by that, but I’m sitting here, a delivery manager taking the founder of the company to a career fair, so I was like, “I better come correct to this.” That’s what I remember about the morning, am I anywhere close?

[01:08:52] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. Yeah. So, here’s what I liked. Number one, you were early. Number two, you were very well-prepared. You had a thermos of coffee for you, for me. You had a, like, a, a Yeti mug for me to use. You were right, you had directions, you were taking it super seriously, and I was like, “We got the right guy. We got the right guy.”

[01:09:14] Jackson Hawkins: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:09:16] Chris Corcoran: You were in control and you were there to do all of the work and make sure that I had to do as little work as possible. 

[01:09:21] Jackson Hawkins: We both did a lot of work at that career fair. That was a wild ride.

[01:09:25] Chris Corcoran: But you set the right expectation, Jackson, for sure. 

[01:09:28] Jackson Hawkins: Yeah. I appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah. And then I remember we shared a few beers that night at the Airbnb and talked life. That was a cool moment.

[01:09:37] Marc Gonyea: I remember you saying how tired you were after being in the job for all day too, Jackson, I think? Those things are exhausting.

[01:09:43] Jackson Hawkins: That was wild, like, all the credit to our recruiters that go to those things regulary, I mean, you are literally standing in a line or you’re sitting at a booth and you have a line of people waiting talk to you, and somebody comes up to you and say, “Here’s my resume. I’m a marketing major,

[01:09:59] here’s when I [01:10:00] graduate, here’s my GPA,” and they give you their elevator pitch and they ask you questions for five or six minutes, and then they turn around, and I remember I had a bottle of water five feet behind me on the table. I didn’t get to drink for hours. I didn’t have the time to turn around and grab a sip of water before the next person is in my face with a resume.

[01:10:19] It is ton of work go to those career fairs. I don’t know how our recruiters do it.

[01:10:24] Chris Corcoran: I remember that. Yeah, super tiring. All right. So, you’ve been an MD, I think it’s officially the summer of 2020, the summer of COVID, and, talk to us a little bit where we are now, how many DMs, how many DMs you need? We got a new office coming up, like, where’s the operation Austin going? 

[01:10:41] Jackson Hawkins: Man, so when I took over as MD, we had 18 SDRs. We are currently at 45 SDRs and we are very soon going to be at 60 SDRs. At the time that I took over as MD, there was really one [01:11:00] manager, wanting to, like, would say there were two managers, and we are currently at five managers, and, realistically, I have a lot of people vying for the next manager position,

[01:11:10] they’re probably going to be two managers promoted within the next month. So, we’re about to be at seven managers in the Austin office, and we’re moving into our new bad-ass office, just north of the Triangle that we’re all really, really excited about. And, I don’t know, the goal for me has sort of selfishly always been that I want to become the new unofficial headquarters of memoryBlue. I want to overtake Virginia. It’ll be headquarters because you guys are there, but I want you guys to at least be having conversations of, “Do we need to move to Austin?” Because, they are a bigger office than Virginia.

[01:11:46] Chris Corcoran: I love it. Hey, Jackson, so I’m curious. That DM role is really kind of our make or break, it’s super important, face of the company, it’s interacting with our clients on a daily, weekly basis. It’s also recruiting and hiring SDRs,  it’s coaching and developing SDRs, it’s such an important position.

[01:12:03] What do you look for in a DM? And then, the second part is, what separates the superstar DMs from the mediocre?

[01:12:14] Jackson Hawkins: What do I look for a DM? We talked about previously that litmus test of, do you get more fulfillment out of helping people achieve their goals or achieving your own goals?

[01:12:25] And, so, if the answer is not, you know, you get more fulfillment out of helping other people achieve their goals, you shouldn’t be a DM. So, that’s the first thing that I look for, and then I look for somebody that can, that can do the work, right? If you are struggling, like, not only do I need you performing as an SDR because you really need to show mastery of your current role to find yourself in a role where you teach other people how to do that role,

[01:12:48] so mastery of the current role, but also, do you have the muscle to take on more work? Right? And, so, I’m looking for people that are going above and beyond the SDR role [01:13:00] and finding ways to add to their plate. So, are they doing PPM meetings on the side? Are they getting heavily involved in our culture club and helping to plan that?

[01:13:10] Are they running trainings? Are they taking on a mentee or better yet, are they taking on two or three mentees? Right? How are they running those mentees? How do their mentees feel about them? That is something that I really look for. I also really value initiative, so I actually, I have people vying for DM positions right now, and I keep a document that rates them on categories. Like, what’s their intellectual horsepower, how well-spoken are they? How good are they at coaching? And then also, like, I have a category for squeakiness, right? Like you said, make it difficult to say no to you, right?

[01:13:46] Like, if you’re in my office every day, talking to me about the DM position, I’m standing there going, ” If I don’t promote this guy, then that’s going to be really, really difficult.” So, I want somebody that wants the position enough that they’re going to go out and just try to [01:14:00] make it happen and, and do whatever they can.

[01:14:02] As far as what separates the mediocre DMs from the exceptional DMs, I think that it comes down to two things really. The first one is coachability, for sure. Like, if I could pick one thing for a DM, it would just be coachable. I’ve worked with a, with a good number of DMs and what has become clear to me, like Jace Edwards, Jace Edwards is a stud DM,

[01:14:24] the other day he told me that he’s starting to feel like a DM Jedi, and I fully agree with him. And, the reason being is because Jace started out and he was coming to me every day 10, 15, 20 times a day with questions, and I would answer them on how to respond to a problem and I’d explain why,

[01:14:43] and he would go out and he would execute, might role play it really quickly, he’d go out and execute, and things went really well for him, and he ultimately graduated to this place where he was on, like, guess-and-check kind of system. So, instead of coming to me and saying, “I’m having this problem with this SDR or this client, how do I [01:15:00] fix it?”

[01:15:00] Instead, he would come to me and say, “I’m having this problem with maybe this SDR, the issue is connection rate, I think that what I need to do is I need to double-check what the quantity of their names is that they list-bill and I need to look at the titles, and then after that I think I might do a connection rate analysis

[01:15:16] on what time of day they experienced the best connection rate, does that all sound good to you?” And, so, he’s guessing and checking with me. So, I always had visibility because I can’t help somebody that is not giving me that visibility, and then if I give them my advice, I feel like, selfishly, they should go out and follow that advice.

[01:15:35] The other thing that I think separates except, exceptional DMs for mediocre DMs is ownership. So, I’ve talked to both of you guys about Jocko Willink. He wrote a book called Extreme Ownership, literally changed my life. I picked it up, at a time where I didn’t think college was for me or anything like that,

[01:15:52] it got me back in college. I excelled in college. I excelled in the SDR position, DM position and extreme ownership is about taking [01:16:00] ownership of everything in your life, and if you’re a leader, everything on your team, right? And, so, there are times where maybe an SDR doesn’t do something that you told them to do,

[01:16:09] right, and a mediocre DM will say, “Oh, it’s this SDRs fault. I told them to do that.” And the exceptional DM says, “This is my fault. I didn’t put some measure in place to hold them accountable or I didn’t make sure that they were clear on what my expectations were.” So, DMs that are coachable and take that extreme ownership to heart,

[01:16:29] those are the people, those are the Jace Edwards and those are, like, the Ross Bartons, you know, like, those are the killer DMs that someone uncovers, now are MD, and Stacy Schoonmaker’s in a different position, but I feel like that could be applied to any one of those exceptional DMs. 

[01:16:45] Chris Corcoran: Absolutely. Very good. All right, Jackson. Well, this was phenomenal. Great insight talking about your story from growing up through being an athlete, caregiver, student, SDR, sales development leader, managing director.

[01:17:00] Jackson Hawkins: Forrest Gump. Guys, I look forward to the next time we have you down here. Marc, make sure that you’re practicing sand volleyball. Chris, bring a change of clothes next time, and will see you then.

[01:17:12] Chris Corcoran: Very good, thanks. 

[01:17:15] Jackson Hawkins: Exactly. We’re gonna work on your jump serve. 

[01:17:19] Chris Corcoran: Thanks, Jackson.